History often hinges on boring technical questions

Plus the Silicon Valley canon and the case for YIMBYing beloved vacation destinations

Donald Trump is sworn in as president on January 20, 2017. (Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

After a very contentious primary season, I think Democrats are now mostly locked and loaded with what’s a broadly reasonable slate of candidates in the key races, albeit certainly not my favorite candidate in all cases.

Strikingly, though, what Democrats do not have is any semblance of a national agenda — no set of policies that they are running on. Back last fall, I pulled these six items from section 5.5 of the moderate manifesto “Deciding to Win,” along with each item’s net favorable rating in a fair poll test that features explicit partisan framing and counterarguments:

• Ban congressional stock trading (+34)

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)

• Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)

• Crack down on tax evasion (+18)

• Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)

• Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)

What I like about this agenda is that these are all ideas to move the policy status quo in a progressive direction, but they are also all ideas that moderates should be comfortable with. You could imagine Mary Peltola or Roy Cooper embracing these six ideas while distancing themselves from the national left in other respects and also imagine Abdul El-Sayed saying he’d like to go much further in a number of areas but is excited to work with a broad range of colleagues on these six items after Democrats win the majority. So why not do it? Maybe cut the lead thing and find something more explicitly affordability-focused like “end the Trump tariffs.”

Tex Pasley: What happens in the alternate history where Ulysses S. Grant sides with the majority of his cabinet and signs the Inflation Bill of 1874?

The context here is that there was a significant financial crisis known as the Panic of 1873 that plunged the world into recession. Back during the Civil War, the American government had started issuing fiat money (“greenbacks”) as a wartime exigency and then shifted back to hard money policies during peacetime. Many members of Congress believed that it would be appropriate to respond to the banking panic by issuing more greenbacks, and they wrote the Inflation Bill of 1874 to accomplish this.

I do not have a really clear answer to the question of what would have happened to American history if Grant had signed this bill, because there is a lot of technical disagreement as to what the bill would even have accomplished.

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their monumental “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” downplay the significance of the bill even as they are sharply critical of the deflationary monetary regime of the era. They focus instead on “The Crime of 1873” — the decision to stop using silver as backing for American currency — and some stuff related to reserve requirements at banks. If Friedman and Schwartz are right about this, then vetoing the Inflation Bill was not actually very significant and the key thing is that Grant should have vetoed the Coinage Act of 1873. That said, Charles Calomiris’s 1992 article on greenbacks says that Friedman and Schwartz are wrong and the Inflation Bill would in fact have been efficacious in halting the deflationary spiral and reviving the economy.

This all turns out to be pretty significant because Democrats won a huge landslide in the 1874 House elections and then ended up with the razor-close 1876 presidential election. That race ended up being hotly disputed and Republicans ultimately “won” it by making a deal with Democrats to end Reconstruction.

If you imagine the Grant administration pursuing a more successful monetary policy, whether you see that as focused on the Inflation Bill or the Coinage Act, then Democrats would have made smaller gains in the 1874 midterms and, more importantly, Rutherford B. Hayes would have carried New York and Indiana in 1876 so the whole disputed election scenario would have been avoided. It strains credulity to argue that a strong Hayes administration would have single-handedly saved the Reconstruction project. The fact is that Democrats were bound to win power sooner or later and (unfortunately) ensuring equal voting rights for African Americans was not a winning issue for Republicans with Northern whites. That being said, four more years of federal backing would have mattered to things like the viability of the Readjuster Party, Virginia’s biracial anti-Democratic coalition, and the fusionist episode in North Carolina, when Republicans and Populists joined forces to wrest control from Democrats.

But the other thing about avoiding the sordid compromise that resolved the 1876 election is that Republicans’ willingness to sell out Reconstruction in order to hold the White House cast a retrospective air of opportunism around the whole thing. Obviously one aspect of voting rights for Black Americans that Republicans liked was that it helped them win elections. In the wake of the compromise, I think the dominant understanding in white America became that this was really the only thing at stake. That the corrupt Grant administration and (later) the “Stalwart” faction of the Republican Party supported voting rights for corrupt, opportunistic reasons.

I don’t want to deny that some opportunism was in play (clearly it was) but, in retrospect, I think we also see voting rights as genuinely one of the most profound moral issues of American history. If Reconstruction had ended in 1881 or 1885 under a Democratic administration that won fair and square and willingly chose to wear the black hat on enforcement of the 15th Amendment, then the whole way this issue played out in the rest of American history would have looked different, and it’s more plausible that a subsequent G.O.P. administration in the 1890–1960 period would have tried to take meaningful action.

This is part of a larger class of phenomena where political consequences that are very interesting to normal people are driven by extremely tedious technical minutiae of monetary policy.

That’s because monetary policy is almost unique in the landscape for its mix of being extremely boring and not the kind of thing a normal person has strong convictions about but also being extremely consequential for short-term economic prosperity, which in turn is a huge deal for election outcomes.

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, to take probably the most important example of this, had a lot of deep roots in the ideological foundations of German nationalism and the trauma of World War I. But Germany was also in a very deep recession in 1932 and pulled out of said recession fairly quickly once Hitler took power. People talk a lot about the hyperinflation of the early Weimar years (1919–23), but that was successfully brought under control. In 1928, with the economy ravaged neither by inflation nor by depression, the Nazi Party finished in ninth place with 2.6 percent of the vote. The Communists were in fourth at 10.6 percent. By 1930, the Depression was in full swing and the Nazis were in second place and the Communists were in third. If the Brüning cabinet had a more effective monetary response to the economic crisis, you can imagine that the neither-Nazi-nor-Communist parties would have done a bit better in 1930 and way better in 1932 and Nazism doesn’t happen. Instead, Hitler took power and the country experienced a rapid economic recovery that entrenched him swiftly.

On a smaller scale, you also see this with Trump and 2016. There are all kinds of deep reasons behind his rise. But the election was extremely close, and I was saying at the time that it was a mistake of Janet Yellen to be preemptively tightening monetary conditions while inflation remained below 2 percent. I think it’s very plausible that slightly different decision-making from the Fed would have led to slightly more votes for Hillary Clinton and thus a very different trajectory of recent American history.

The moral of the story is that for all the ink that gets spilled on hot-button political disputes, the single most underrated thing in politics is getting the technical aspects of macroeconomic policy right.

Owen Gwilliam: Purportedly there is a canon of books that plays a large role in Silicon Valley’s understanding of the world and its role in it, with Patrick Collison offering an attempt at a list and with Tanner Greer offering an assessment (Greer jokes “In Washington people never read books—they just write them.”)

If you could add a book or two to this Silicon Valley canon, what would you suggest?

Collison is trying to be descriptive in terms of listing books that he believes are widely read in Silicon Valley and influential in shaping people’s understanding of how the world works. I would not attempt to argue with him about this or add anything because he would know much better than I would. My observation of tech executives and venture capitalists is that relative to their interests, intelligence, and basic worldview they tend to have weird crank opinions about macroeconomics.

You can see that in everything from Blake Scholl casually endorsing the gold standard this week to how Marc Andreessen used to insist that G.D.P. was mismeasuring the economic impact of the internet using a wildly invalid methodology. That latter opinion was incredibly widespread 10 or 15 years ago and has now vanished because Tyler Cowen spent a lot of time specifically debunking it and tech guys (per Collison’s list) like to read Tyler Cowen. I’m all for reading Marginal Revolution, which is great, but like any good blog its interests are a little bit idiosyncratic and Cowen hasn’t written much about the gold standard issue since 2012 or so. I might recommend Friedman’s “Money Mischief” as an accessible introduction to this basic topic that would prevent people from making dumb mistakes.

Robert Frodeman: Is it time to revisit the narrative about the 2021 Afghan withdrawal? I remain puzzled why the view took hold that this was a disaster for Biden. The war had gone on way too long, losing lives and treasure; he was boxed in by Trump’s prior agreement; and while 13 deaths were a tragedy isn’t that a low number comparatively?

While I have many criticisms of the Biden presidency, I have always thought the media treatment of this episode was shameful and unfair. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right strategic move for the United States. The deaths of the 13 service members are very sad. But over the course of 20 years of war there were 2,459 military deaths, plus nearly 2,000 civilian contractors, more than a dozen C.I.A. personnel, and many dead from various allied nations to say nothing of the Afghan death toll. The whole episode struck me as shamefully successful media manipulation by the architects of an egregious failure that was many years in the making, allowing them to duck blame for their own conduct and instead shift the entire focus onto second-guessing the details of a withdrawal under fire rather than looking at the broad strokes of a massive policy failure.

BBDC: Given how much of an anti establishment mood the electorate is in, I’m worried about the habit that media outlets, commentators and takesters have of using the words “moderate” and “establishment” (or “establishment backed”) interchangeably regardless of the actual backgrounds and experiences of the candidates involved. How can moderate members and candidates successfully position themselves to voters as outsiders? And how can we get journalists and commentators to stop using this lazy language?

Longer post on this coming, but I want to introduce a richer understanding of the factional landscape. There is a relatively small but very noisy real leftist insurgent movement afoot in the party right now. But there is also a much larger and more practically influential “progressive establishment” that the insurgency sometimes targets (as in Melat Kiros versus Diana DeGette) but sometimes champions (as in Peggy Flanagan versus Angie Craig). There’s also a bunch of moderately moderate politicians like Craig and the whole New Dem caucus in the House. Then there is also a small and not that noisy — but I believe growing — group of true moderates like the House Blue Dogs and hopefully Mary Peltola soon. This group is, as I’ve said before, a centrist faction trying to mount a centrist critique of the Clinton / Biden / Harris / Schumer progressive establishment, not trying to defend that status quo.

But, yes, I think moderates need to be as clear and aggressive as possible that we are not arguing for continuation of the Biden-Warren synthesis on domestic policy or are here in life to just prop up Chuck Schumer. I’ve expressed to Third Way’s leaders that while I agree with them that the D.S.A. is bad, I think front-loading an anti-D.S.A. message turns moderates into dupes for an establishment that doesn’t listen to us about anything.

Conversely, while I will not try to claim Luke Bronin as a huge warrior for moderation, he’s an abundance guy who is part of The Bench’s generally pretty moderate slate and he just knocked off an incumbent House member who scored the Working Families Party endorsement. Which is just to say you don’t have to be a leftist to practice anti-establishment politics. You just need some balls.

policy wank: How do you think about applying YIMBYism to a tony vacation destination like Cape Cod where it does sort of seem like the place could be “ruined” by a substantial increase in density?

I’m writing this from my vacation house in a remote town in coastal Maine, so I’m not going to say that I am indifferent to the force of the point that some people like their vacation destinations to be a certain way. But I ultimately don’t think this is a particularly compelling argument.

Suppose more housing is being built in Brooklin, Maine, and stipulate that this is handled in a way that aligns with good-faith issues about well water and septic systems but not just rank NIMBYism or status quo bias. As supply expands, you may run out of additional people who want houses here at which point densification will halt. It’s also possible that there is some increment of new supply such that it generates a reduction in demand, which means that the halting point arrives sooner than if you model it purely as “keep building homes until everyone who wants one gets one.” Either way, a new equilibrium eventually arises that has higher overall welfare and economic prosperity than under the old equilibrium. So that’s good.

Now obviously doing radical upzoning just in one random coastal town is a kind of weird idea that would lead to weird outcomes. In principle what you ought to do is upzone all the towns in Maine simultaneously. That would lead to a larger aggregate improvement in the state’s economic well-being but (probably) a smaller disruption in any given town.

The broader point I would make here is that while preferences vary, so does the built environment of coastal communities in the United States. And essentially all different kinds of coastal places are considered desirable. I am not all that familiar with Cape Cod, but my recollection is that it’s incredibly dense compared with Maine. When I looked up the numbers, I saw that Barnstable County in Massachusetts has 581 people per square mile versus 362 in Cumberland County, which is Maine’s densest county and contains Portland and its suburbs. Of course with vacation communities population density can be misleading, but to the eyeball test this area, which is quaint and rural by Massachusetts standards, is indeed highly urbanized by Maine standards.

So if coastal Maine densified and became similar to Cape Cod, some people would feel that it was ruined — but lots of people love Cape Cod. Similarly, if Cape Cod densified, some people would feel that it was ruined (those people might start vacationing in Maine), but other people might like it better. Miami Beach is very popular. So is Ocean City, Md.

When I went to very dense Juan-les-Pins in France, I thought it was incredibly cool.

The French Riviera has a totally different vibe from a rural getaway, but it is a popular and world-renowned destination. One thing is that while there are for sure congestion disamenities in a vacation getaway, there are also benefits. A beach town with lots of people in it has more varied restaurants and more competition between them. I love spending my summers up here, but it’s hard to see movies when you’re 70 minutes from the nearest theater, and there was no way to catch “The Odyssey” in IMAX.

To make a long story short, I am trying not to be inhuman about this. I am as prone to status quo bias and nostalgia about the particular places I love as anyone else. But there’s a high economic cost to preventing construction where demand is high, and, viewed objectively, people do seem to like all kinds of coastal destinations. These places aren’t actually “ruined” by change.

C-Man: Matt - you mentioned having done transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression. 1) Without too many details, what made you decide to try it (therapist’s suggestion / psychiatrist’s prescription, ineffective medications, etc.)? 2) Did it work?

I was annoyed by some of the side effects of medication and Dr. Google suggested that T.M.S. might be a viable alternative. I believe it’s only actually approved for depression that is resistant to medication and that’s the only case in which insurance will cover it. But I paid out of pocket and thought it worked great. The caveat you are supposed to flag here is that compared to a pill it is very difficult to do a proper double-blind placebo test because having your brain zapped with the magnets feels like someone is hitting you in the head. That being said, even if it only works because of the placebo effect, that still works.